Michel de Certeau begins his chapter "Walking in the City" with an evocative fragment: "Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center." Though that unified perspective has vanished, it remains essential to the imagined cartography of New York. Over the past decade, writers have composed poems, stories, plays, and novels in an effort to address the trauma of September 11, 2001. Only more recently, however, have scholars attempted to assess what it means to talk about a genre of "post-9/11 literature."

This panel invites proposals that specifically address the role of urban spaces -- not exclusively New York -- in post-9/11 literature. How does contemporary literature use the city to frame the instabilities of political and/or domestic life in the post-9/11 era? How do writers employ discourses of urban decline or urban renewal to configure trauma or re-imagine community? How have the city’s "narrative cartographies" shifted in response to 9/11? Please send inquiries or 250-500 word abstracts to Keith Wilhite (kwilhite@siena.edu).